Joan Klingel Ray (email: jray@uccs.edu),
Professor of English and President’s Teaching Scholar at the
University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, was JASNA’s President
for three terms between 2000 and 2006. She has scholarly
publications on Austen, as well as Charles Dickens, George Herbert,
Dr. Johnson, and other authors.

Readers
of Sir Walter Scott’s famous unsigned review of Emma are
frequently tantalized by its final paragraph, particularly that
paragraph’s final words, which are surrounded by quotation
marks: “the ‘tenderest, noblest and best’”
(201).1 Scott uses the quoted phrase when he returns
in the essay’s final paragraph to his earlier one-paragraph
discussion of Sense and Sensibility. Commenting on
Austen’s first published novel, Scott observes that Marianne
Dashwood “transfers her affection to a very respectable and
somewhat too serious admirer” (194). According to Edward
Copeland, Scott’s closing paragraph “registers his
lingering disappointment in the conclusion of Austen’s first
novel” (SS xxxi), where realism replaces romance.
Scott begins the final paragraph with a plea in favor “of that
once powerful divinity, Cupid, king of gods and men, who in these
times of revolution, has been assailed, even in his own kingdom of
romance, by the authors who were formerly his devoted priests”
(200). He then asks:

Who is it, that in his youth has felt a virtuous attachment, however
romantic or however unfortunate, but can trace back to its influence
much that his character may possess of what is honourable, dignified,
and disinterested? . . . [They] are neither less wise nor
less worthy members of society for having felt, for a time, the
influence of a passion which has been well qualified as the
“tenderest, noblest and best.” (QR 200-01;
qtd. by Copeland xxxi)

Responding to the same Scott paragraph and the quotation with which he ends it,
Janet Todd and Antje Blank see Scott as being “[s]eemingly more
inspired by personal nostalgia than by critical acumen” (lx).
Jane Millgate observes that Scott’s closing paragraph is “a
surprisingly personal passage to find in the pages of the Quarterly
Review . . . , but it is also specifically—if
codedly—autobiographical” (190). She then lengthily
decodes the passage in terms of the young Scott’s early love
for and loss of Williamina Belches: “the encounter with
Austen’s more prudential lovers for some reason triggers in
Scott not only the memory of his loss, but the need to celebrate more
generally the energies and aspirations generated by the lover’s
pursuit of the beloved, even when that pursuit proves ultimately
vain” (190).

However provocative such biographical speculations about Scott’s use of
the phrase “tenderest, noblest and best” to speak of love
may be, his inspiration was literary, rather than personal. The
original use of the phrase “The Tenderest, Noblest, and the
Best” to describe love comes from Part I of Armine and
Elvira, A Legendary Poem (1770) by British clergyman and inventor
of the power loom, Dr. Edmund Cartwright.2 Quoting
the recollections of her father, Mary Cartwright Strickland writes
that this “‘legendary tale . . . went through
seven editions in a little more than a year’” (17).
Scott definitely knew and admired the poem, which was originally
published by John Murray (1745-1793), whose son and successor, John
Murray (1778-1843), was Scott’s own publisher and friend, and
the founder of the Quarterly Review, where Scott’s
review of Emma appeared. Scott’s high regard for
Cartwright’s ballad is recorded in his “Essay on
Imitations of the Ancient Ballad,” which introduces Part III of
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, where he complains about
poets whose works poorly imitate “the simplicity of ancient
poetry” (4:17). A notable exception, Scott says, is
Cartwright’s Armine and Elvira: “We need
only to stop and mention another very beautiful piece of this
fanciful kind, by Dr. Cartwright, called ‘Armin (sic) and
Elvira,’ containing some excellent poetry expressed with
unusual beauty” (19).

Armine and Elvira is a product of the age of sensibility in which it was
composed. The ballad begins with an elderly hermit who
nostalgically speaks of his beloved son, Armine, a true hero of
sensibility, whose

Heart no selfish Cares confin’d,

He felt for all that feel Distress,

And, still benevolent and kind

He bless’d them, or he wish’d to bless. (9-12)

But because of Armine’s sensibility, his hermit-father prays a
warning to his son to be chary of that “One Passion [that is] a
dangerous guest”: “Well may’st thou wonder
when I blame / The Tenderest, Noblest, and the Best”
(14, my italics). “The Flowers of Love,” he claims,
“are Weeds of Woe” (15). But the father’s
“Precept was too late” (16).

Part II begins with a setting that may have inspired Mrs. Radcliffe’s
castle of Udolpho, as Armine rambles into “the Bosom of a
Wood,” where he sees “An antique Castle towering stood, /
In Gothic Grandeur” (17).3 The castle’s
owner, “Raymond, long in Arms renown’d,” has “an
only Daughter” (17). Elvira—like Marianne Dashwood,
“eager in every thing; her sorrows, her joys, could have no
moderation” (7)—refuses to exert self-control: “Her
Breast, impatient of Controul, / Scorn’d in its silken Chains
to lye” (18). While Armine experiences immediate love for
Elvira, he harbors this love for two years: “Her ARMINE
saw, he saw, he lov’d. / He lov’d—alas! And he
despair’d!” (19). Armine despairs that the highborn
Elvira probably “listens to no lowly Swain; / Her Charms must
bless some happier Youth, / Some youth of Fortune’s titled
Train” (20). (Here, one may note a similarity to
Wentworth’s initial courtship of Anne Elliot, who is considered
socially and economically superior to him.) Armine and Elvira
finally meet, however, and Elvira observes that Armine’s
“mournful Voice, that modest Air, / . . . speak the
courteous Breast” (26). Cartwright’s lovers
experience the type of love-at-first-sight that Marianne Dashwood
feels for Willoughby and that she loves to read about in “a
favourite story” (SS 51). Unfortunately for the
young lovers, Elvira’s father, Raymond, relying on first
impressions, scorns Armine as low-born and hurls a javelin at
him—only to learn that Armine’s hermit-father is actually
the heroic Egbert, who had been Raymond’s youthful patron.

In a letter concluded on 2 December 1815, John Murray, the publisher of
Emma, had enquired of Scott, “Have you any fancy to dash
off an article on Emma? It wants incident and romance, does it
not? None of the author’s other novels have been noticed
[i.e., in the Quarterly Review], and surely Pride and
Prejudice merits high commendation” (Smiles 1:288).4
Murray’s comment that Emma lacks “incident and
romance” may well have influenced Scott to begin his discussion
of Austen’s fourth published novelwith the contention
that “Emma has even less story than either of the
preceding novels” (195). But Murray’s observation
that the book lacks “romance” may also have suggested to
Scott the idea of providing a literary history of the development of
the genre for the essay’s first nine paragraphs before even
reaching an Austen novel. Observing that “the novel was
the legitimate child of the romance,” he traces the romance’s
influence “in the conduct of the narrative, and the tone of
sentiment attributed to the fictitious personages” (189).
However, “a style of novel has arisen, within the last fifteen
or twenty years, differing from the former in the points upon which
the interest hinges” (192). This genre depends on “the
art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks
of life” (193). Then comes his great compliment to Austen:

We, therefore, bestow no mean compliment upon the author of Emma,
when we say that, keeping close to common incidents, and to such
characters as occupy the ordinary walks of life, she has produced
sketches of such spirit and originality, that we never miss the
excitation which depends upon a narrative of uncommon events, arising
from the consideration of minds, manners, and sentiments, greatly
above our own. In this class she stands almost alone. . . . (193)

Yet however much praise Scott gives to Austen for her realism, Scott
also yearns for the aforementioned “tone of sentiment
attributed to fictitious persons.” As Scott states:

Upon the whole, the turn of this author’s novels bears the same
relation to that of the sentimental and romantic cast, that
cornfields and cottages and meadows bear to the highly adorned
grounds of a show mansion, or the rugged sublimities of a mountain
landscape. It is neither so captivating as the one, nor so
grand as the other. . . . (200)

Clearly, Scott, like many readers of Sense and Sensibility, could not
accept the narrative reassurance offered by Austen that in marrying
Brandon, “Marianne could never love by halves; and her whole
heart became, in time, as much devoted to her husband, as it had once
been to Willoughby” (430). As a writer who relied heavily
on sentiment in his own books, it is not surprising that after
reviewing Emma, Scott returns to Sense and Sensibility,
where Marianne feels for Willoughby that passion “which has
been well qualified as the ‘tenderest, noblest and best’”
(201). Ironically, however, Scott did not remember that the
hermit follows his accolade to love by warning that “The
Flowers of Love are Weeds of Woe,” which is what the lovesick
and physically weakened Marianne, of course, learns at Cleveland.
She walks where “the grass was the longest and wettest”
(346). But the “Weeds of Woe” do not nearly kill
Marianne; rather, unsentimentally, the cold and feverish infection
she suffers from neglecting to change out of “her wet shoes and
stockings” nearly does. With Scott’s desire for
sentiment, it is surprising that he did not complain of Austen’s
realistic cure of Marianne through the skills of a country
apothecary.5

Notes

1.
While dated 1815, this issue of the Quarterly Review actually appeared in 1816.
Recent scholarly treatments discussing Scott’s review and its
closing quoted phrase appear in the “Introductions” to
the Cambridge University Press editions of Sense and Sensibility
(xxxi) and Persuasion (lx), written respectively by Edward
Copeland and by Janet Todd and Antje Blank. Recent scholarly
discussion about Scott’s review of Emma include books by
Annika Bautz (11-12, passim), Adela Pinch (141), Janet Todd (129),
and Peter Knox-Shaw (225). Three collections of edited Austen
criticism, which include Scott’s Emma review without
identifying the closing quotation, are edited by Ian Littlewood
(1:296), B. C. Southam (72), and Fiona Stafford (56). All
quotations from Scott’s review of Emma are to the
original version in the Quarterly Review.

2.
Armine and Elvira (14). All quotations refer to page numbers from the 3rd edition.

3.
Radcliffe describes Udolpho looking down on a “deep shaggy valley”
with its “towers and battlements” in all of its “gothic
greatness” (226).

4.
After reading the anonymous review sent to her by Murray, Austen returned
it with a letter saying, “The Authoress of
Emma has no reason I think to complain of her treatment in it—except in the total
omission of Mansfield Park.—I cannot but be sorry that so
clever a Man as the Reveiwer of Emma,
should consider it as unworthy of being noticed” (1 April 1816).

5.
Coincidentally, Oxford University’s digitized copy of Armine and Elvira
consulted for this essay has a flyleaf bearing the following
handwritten words: “Bt. from Mr. R. W. Chapman.”